Ismail Serageldin

TV Episodes

Jurji Zaidan: The Man and His Legacy

27/03/2014

Ismail Serageldin, a long-time admirer of Jurji Zaidan, was invited by the Zaidan Foundation (http://www.zaidanfoundation.org/) and the Library of Congress to participate in a symposium organized to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Zaidan's birth and the 120th anniversary of the establishment of his cultural magazine Al-Hilal, which is still publishing at present. Serageldin contributed an essay and was to deliver the opening keynote address. Regretfully, political events in Egypt at the time prevented his travel to participate in person, and thus he delivered a relatively short video address which was shown at the event in Washington on 5 June 2012 at the Library of Congress.

The Zaidan Foundation -- which has issued a volume of proceedings nice volume of proceedings (edited by Jurji Zaidan and Thomas Philipp and entitled: Jurji Zaidan: Contributions to Modern Arab Thought and Literature, Published by The Zaidan Foundation Incorporated; December 19, 2013) that included the Serageldin essay within its pages -- welcomed the idea of combining the original essay and the video presentation into a new and fuller version, to be issued by the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (BA), the New Library of Alexandria, in a different format. Despite the overlap, this was given a newer title and delivered as a formal lecture, recorded here at the Library of Alexandria so that it would be available to many who did not attend the event in Washington DC in 2012. The expanded text of the lecture is also presented along with the DVD in this package as a monograph with the title: Jurji Zaidan: The Man and His Legacy, noting that it does have very substantial overlap with the original Serageldin essay "Jurji Zaidan's Contribution to Arab Thought and Literature" which appears in pages 17-43 of the Volume published by the Foundation referred to above.